Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

Maybe. It is strange that despite consistently (though admittedly not often) POS warping each month for silver vouchers and whenever I go to exp, I am just now getting hit for it despite years of safety, but if that's what did it, then I don't particularly have any objections or upset about it. It is what it is.

I think I might go back to Lost Ark or PSO2 now. I wasn't playing them because I couldn't juggle two MMOs, but I no longer have that problem.

I don't believe they have GMs checking. I do know from experience that botting combat 24/7 without other tools can get you banned. I'd wager that I understand what tools are detectable more than just about anyone on this forum, too, so I'm not 'accidentally' blaming the wrong thing.

It is trivial to detect a character being active too long, and we know for a fact they already have the code (characters idle in town for 10 minutes become non-clipping). All they have to do is set a threshold on the same code for triggering bot detection and lump it in with POS and speed, which is what they've almost certainly done.

I honestly feel like the people claiming they don't ever ban for exp are just using wishful thinking. They bot exp, they aren't willing to stop botting exp, and they feel more comfortable if nobody tries to tell them that it is still a potential ban.

Likely this IMO, someone reported you. The same thing happened to Ejiin. Either way, it sucks for sure but I guess it's back to the mines, Galka.

If I was running the STFU I would just hand out 3-4-5-6 month bans for stuff like this, and flag the account so it's easier to do it next time.

I would never perma ban people unless it's RMT or something ridiculous.

I know they like to ban people to send a message to everyone else, but ff11 isn't fortnite and it's hard to replace these players. The salvage bans for example were idiotic, and decimated the JP HNM scene on my server.

people on 14 get bans for streaming plugins,
people on 11 don't give a fk at all.

It will be the first time in decades I've heard of automated bot detection or similar. If they had something like that I wonder why they would bother sending GMs to check if players are afk with check boxes when they should already know, in the past. It feels also like we are in a different era in terms of game policing, as the beginning of RoV saw the automated systems being commonplace and almost no GM interaction from budget drop.

I have no stake in claiming it's not exp botting. I just think it confuses people and we should make sure people know the most likely culprit is POS hacking and automated addons with known flaws like fastfollow and things that interact with menus automatically.

If you have some knowledge that's recent or data to share, you would probably save more accounts by discussing your experiences instead of just saying it could be anything that's a cheat. SE does not care, this is almost surely automated to account for no budget, but it will be the first ive heard of afk botting or idle characters doing actions with no other possibility of automated addons.

It's just not true. Barely nobody watches XI content, ask any previous XI creator. Nobody was watching his stream that's of any importance. He got banned for one of his long list of addons that he used to control 6 characters at once practically completely automated for many hours a day, surely one of them tripped something up or he did things off stream he didn't discuss. It's way more likely than a GM or SE staff looking at his stream, it's a huge stretch and completely unbelievable.

It's not strange, it's been speculated they turn it off or on for specific times couple times a year. Free campaign, live streams for the game or special events. Its speculation because obviously nobody knows for sure unless they work for SE. It's also some threshold that nobody knows as far as I heard. Clicking a direction once isn't going to put you on the list, some threshold would be logical. Also it could be a pooled list these gets suspensions randomly, with the second suspension being permanent. What was your first suspension for?

the detection is probably well in place for POS movement, but the enforcement is also very low. i've used it liberally day in and day out for years and yet to get hit with anything for it across nearly a dozen characters. not suggesting you try your luck, but may the odds be ever in your favor.

I have no interest in helping people cheat just enough to get away with it, I'd rather the game was clean. You're not doing anyone any favors by convincing them that unsafe things are safe, though.

Anyone else, I'd say there's 0 chance of SE looking at the stream. I honestly think Ejiin was banned specifically because he was using his stream to spread multiboxing tools and outright guiding people how to cheat, not because of anything he was doing himself. If someone was made aware of that, it only makes sense to get rid of him.

I would like to see the game clean too, but at this point it's practically impossible. When SE stopped caring, I don't know much of a reason to care either about that kind of thing. I do care when people who enjoy playing or have played a long time, get banned. I find it sad and definitely want to relay information to prevent it from happening to anyone else. Someone may see his post and think it's exp botting, so they are okay if they do it less. All the while they are warping everywhere during a potential automated system being active.

We've had this discussion many times when it comes up. I just don't see the point in not sharing your experiences when every tom *** and Harry is cheating with any available addon from Google. It just hurts the game to lose people and then their friends quit etc. They come to the forums with a negative outlook on the game and share that with others. Just pointless when any information could potentially help them do something safer. That's just my opinion and my experiences.

As far as Eijin, I really don't see it. We are all speculating here but it would take them reporting him to a non existing GM force at that time period (and now), then they would have to go outside the game to his stream or video, find his account/server/character and issue the ban... it seems so unusual, unprecedented and a huge cost of reaources.. when the most likely scenario, around that time home point warper had a known flaw, and fastfollow was warping people places (which he heavily used to multi box.)

You bought a lottery ticket every time you did it and you lost every other month, but you won this time.

Congrats on the freedom


My current accounts have been cruising 24/7 (aside from maint and net failures) for 21000 hours and counting.

Also, take a break and the option of returning is always available. There is almost nothing that is impossible to regain aside from vanity items that are done from RL purchases(many of them are being repurposed in new items anyway.) Thats probably not much of a thought to you after losing it all, but it's not impossible and many have done it. If they put new content you might want to play, just saying. I saw some of your posts on reddit and it seemed you were jaded for a while, so a break probably will be best for you, but the game won't be hard to enjoy later, from personal experiences at least.

yeah for every story of a ban there's another of someone going unpunished for the same thing. pretty much agree with Draylo that the game is a lost cause at this point, but maybe my persspective as a cheater skews this. in group content i severly limit what i use, but that line is arbitrary and meaningless to anyone else.

It would be nice if they actually told people what they banned them for. I understand they aren't obligated to, but it would probably help not just the bannee, but the remainder of the community to shape up how they want it.

If you state "you got banned because you pos hacked the 10th time today" then everyone will know they can pos hack 9 times and not get banned.

And they all will.

"You were banned for botting in excess of 8 hours" ; "You are allowed to bot for 7 hours and 59 minutes"

"Well they don't have to be that specific" They already tell you what you were doing. Cheating and/or botting. You know what you did. Whether you got got for one or both doesn't matter.

Pretty much this. Same reason they can't do a X-month suspension. Low enforcement rate is only a deterrant if the cost of being enforced is extremely high and you have no way to predict it.

If they just said "You got banned for pos-hacking" then we'd know they take that particular thing seriously. If basically everyone who gets banned is banned for that specifically, it would be a clear indicator for players to stop.

The only automation I do at all is GearSwap. I know that is also against TOS, but it's something that like 99% of the playerbase uses so I don't feel terribly at risk for getting banned. If I ever did get banned, I'd be devastated. It'd be 100x worse if I didn't even know what I got banned for.

They don't want you to stop just one cheat. They want you to wonder what is cheating so people hesitate around anything. It'd be beneficial to the cheater to tell you what it was, it's not beneficial to SE or the game.

What do you mean by cruising.

I know from personal experience that being in one zone and /attack on for more than 24hrs consecutively is likely to get you papped.

It is so beneficial to the game. If everyone's cheating out the wazoo, and only one person is getting banned a month with no explanation, telling that person they were banned specifically for pos-hacking, the community would suddenly be scared from using that one cheat.

Once they get everyone scared from that one particular thing, they could bring the hammer down on another cheat, and then another, until they're satisfied with the state of the game.

If we don't know what to be scared of, we're not going to be scared of anything.

Everyone who pays any attention knows POS and speed get you banned. You don't have to believe the people who've gotten hit for botting if you don't want, but it should be easy enough to understand that you can get hit for that too.

A huge portion of the playerbase is still POSing, speeding, and botting because the enforcement rate is low. It doesn't matter if SE tells you outright that they are banworthy offenses if the general attitude is still '99.9% wont get punished, go for it'. So, how is them saying it outright any different than the amount of players who *have* been hit confirming it?

If you really want disclosure from SE, it'd be better for them to outright say that some tools are OK(like gearswap). The reality is that they won't do it, because it alienates purists. Further, gearswap itself is such an abstract concept that you can't really say it's ok.. some gearswap files have built in POS(to avoid spell interrupts), speed, bots, etc. It has access to enough of the game systems via windower's lua api that they aren't really limited in scope.

Thorny has already said it 10x, but this is exactly why they do it the way they do. If they told everyone the specific program/behavior they were banned for, it would be tacitly approving all the ones that they WEREN'T banning for, which they don't want to do. Also: if someone uses 50 banned addons, how do they pick which one was "the one" they got banned for?

It's not practical to tell people what they got banned for, or helpful to enforcement at all.

They told us what's unacceptable, all of it. If you want to be secure in your account and know you aren't gonna get banned, cut it all out. Otherwise, you're taking *some level* of risk doing whatever you feel is the appropriate amount of cheating. Do whatever you think is worth risking.

It's made worse by the fact that when people are banned they're frequently dismissive of the tools they use, so gathering any real data is really hard, other than unreliable third-hand stories.

Not saying that about SK, he used pretty much every known cheat and openly admitted to it, both on this forum and privately, but many people say "oh I was only using XYZ" or "I only POS once a year" or other *** when they get banned.

Just running continuously. I know plenty of people doing the exact same. My friend went away a week on vacation, leaving his character to ML and came back with no issues. Makes you wonder why they didn't add cap quests for ML.

This is honestly the first time I heard about any automated system for afk characters doing actions, really across any network of information I have available. Also this is considering the bare minimum of addons, when literally all these people doing this stuff are running with every addon possible. Even this guy didn't mention pos hacking because he thought it wasn't relevant. It doesn't have to be the same day, you could have done it at the start of the billng period and they got you the following.

Why is it that this kind of anecdote is interpretted as proof botting is safe:

But this kind of anecdote isn't enough to believe POSing is safe:

You don't get automatically banned for cheating alone. You get detected, and some further criteria(reports, random dice roll, some employee checking off 3 names in the list of 1500 detected cheaters, whatever) comes into play before you get banned.

People choose to believe the anecdotes that reinforce the cheats they want to use. They read a story online that said their cheat is safe and only other cheat will get you banned, they believe that story and ignore the stories about their cheat getting someone banned and assume they used something else that caused it, not their precious cheat.

It could be anything, nobody has proven any cheat safe to my satisfaction. If you're gonna use any of this stuff, be prepared to get that email.

This is what got you banned. You jumped further than any lag spike could account for.

Ejin got banned and denied ever using anything ban worthy. When people went over his old videos and found things to disprove that claim, he took all his videos private.

Ejin didnt get banned because he's a streamer.

Lag spike doesn't account for anything, because the movement update packet still says how many steps your character took and the server still knows how much time passed between movement packets. Being able to automatically detect speed anomalies is a function of both time and speed, if a player were to run in a straight line for 20 seconds you can verifiably say that someone is using as little as 5-6% movement speed they shouldn't have with no chance of false positive. If you're running in a normal pattern, it probably needs to be more like 15-20% to safely detect without false positives in 20 seconds. POSing any distance more than a couple yalms is always going to be detectable.

I never said botting was safe, only that it's the least likely reason to get hit compared to the usual. To my knowledge previously the only way was an actual GM, typically using a check box, to determine an afk bot.

I've heard from far more people getting hit for addons/POS compared to people simply botting afk with the minimal stuff. Was just sharing my information and in this case it seems the most likely as to what happened from my experience. I was almost convinced it had to be POS hacking or an addon. You and now Dodik are the only people I've heard of having experience with afk botting causing a ban, but with no data or knowing what was in use during that time.. it just doesn't help much really.

It's not a surprise to hear people getting lucky, it's been guessed for s long time that it isn't always active or there is a threshold in use, which can vary greatly. Nobody can accurately tell, only use known information to try and avoid it. That's why when this surfaces every so often, I like to see if there's a wave going on to see if they actually care or it's them turning something back on /off.

Wasn't Ejin the SAM who was 6boxing all the buff/support jobs?

LOL @ "I wasn't using anything ban worthy" while "playing" 6 characters at once. Man must be an absolute monster of multi-tasking.

Side note but at least 1 other close friend of mine/SK's got suspended, possibly (probably) a third person as well. Probably a wave, maybe they were caught up together maybe it's just SE doing their regular checkups.